Saturday, January 24, 2009

Chuck, Lyndon and the Long-Faced Chorus

The dour angels of the local LaRouche Youth Movement opened today's meeting with classical praise to God. It was neither to Lyndon LaRouche nor to Chuck Turner.

At the ballroom of the Radisson in Park Square, they sang a cappella in Latin and lacked only emotion. Not aware that the youthful political cadre routinely belted 'em out, I wondered what else they could do beyond haranguing passersby like Scientologists or soliciting contributions. In this case, they didn't seem to have any fun producing fine music. Two young women were unable to stifle smiles leaving the front, but otherwise, it was as though Vulcans were preforming.

Without even the excuse of desperation, Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner was sharing lollipops with strange kids. Except for the occasional blunder such as porn confused with news, Turner's personal theatrics have been more entertaining than destructive. What has he to do with LaRouche sorts?

After his arrest and indictment for allegedly extorting a bribe to facilitate a liquor license, Turner has been on a tear. His often florid and always loosely reasoned claims went out there.

At the Radisson before the meeting, it was clear that this was a mandated event for the LaRouche youth. They knew each other and outnumbered the rest of us considerably. Under 100 attended and the 20-somethings dominated. Each was obviously trained to engage, gathering names and contact info on the way in, offering dozens of tracts as stapled magazines or perfect-bound booklets.

I now own:

A DVD that will apparently explain why Barack Obama had better act like Franklin Roosevelt in a big hurry

A nearly 300-page Children of Satan, anti-Dick Cheney screed

The current Executive Intelligence Review

A Your Enemy George Soros LaRoche PAC dossier

The Program for World Economic Recovery

Tantamount to Treason on the economic bailout bills

Last fall's The Tasks Before Us in the Post-Cheney Era

Is the Devil in Your Laptop?

Together, those have a suggested contribution value of about $100. I would gladly share so all could enjoy and learn. However, parting with Is the Devil in Your Laptop might be tough for me. In that, Lyndon himself comes heavy on "...Cyberspace looney-bins such as MySpace, Facebook, and killer modes in computer games." A few pages later a Matthew Ogden decries that "Globalization is the thermodynamic 'heat death' of human culture, denegration towards an undifferentiated world 'blah' (what some have dubbed the blogosphere, better named the blah-gosphere)."

If you don't know LaRouche beyond the blinking sidewalk solicitors, you can do worse that start with his Wikipedia entry. There are plenty of links to his documents, as well comments from detractors and champions. I won't touch him here, except where Chuck Turner and the LaRouche folk overlap.

The 86-year-old LaRouche remains fundamentally an economist. His people claim virtually Cassandra-class prognostication there — infallible but ignored. With that eye, he seems to see a kindred mind and spirit in Turner. Speaking at the Radisson for the LaRouche PAC, Western States Spokesman Harley Schlanger said that the group would support Turner because such fighters for the right are rare.

...it makes you sick to your stomach

Turner, Schlanger and LaRouche PAC's literature have some clear overlap in this way. In his remarks, Turner iterated some of he LaRouche argot. A recurrent term in his address, as well as Schlanger's and the lit, was the British Empire.

Woe to us who are so ignorant as to think first of King George III and later the Raj. Instead, this appears to be a shorthand for the larger evils of the cartels that secretly control the world. Schlanger twice expanded the term, first to Anglo-Dutch Empire and then to Anglo-Dutch-Saudi Empire.

Several times, Turner used British Empire á la LaRouche when he meant the old white oppressor class. Fundamentally, Turner was on solid ground when he said this country's economic system has never been fair to all, particularly to those of color, to women and to working whites. How odd though for his to parrot the code phrase.

Turner had another good point in his hit-and-miss criticism of his own prosecution. He fairly questions how U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan had the chutzpah to try to forbid Turner from talking about the case publicly when Sullivan himself has released a still shot off video before the indictment claiming that it showed Turner accepting a $1,000 bribe. Even in playground terms, that's not fair. If Sullivan can trash talk, why not Turner?

At the podium, Turner was much less substantial and much more conspiratorial when he branched from his case. In his lingo, "prosecutors will collude with the media." That seems less likely and yet harder to prove than Sullivan's challenge to show that Turner offered a tit for tat with the liquor license. In the latter case, Sullivan either has the taped evidence and witness testimony or loses his case. For his part, Turner also surmised that Sullivan wanted higher office, like commonwealth governor, which would be his motivation for pegging Turner.

The Council may have been overthinking the media angle in other ways as well. He said that after he ignored his lawyer's instructions to shut up about the case, "my campaign worked — the media backed off." He apparently did not consider Occam's razor possibility — the media got bored with him and the case, and won't report again until there's news not just noise from Turner.

Yet, to me Turner remains deliciously vivid. At 68, he is still activist frisky. He spoke of himself as a crusader, poking the bear. He expected to get poked back. In this case, he and the LaRouche folk claim that the sting that got Turner indicted followed shortly after the Councilor railed against foreclosures on property of poor people.

He continues to play the drama queen well and use fitting language. He said, "When you get in a fight, you don't think about what would happen if you lose. You think about how to win!"

On the one hand, for this case, he claims total innocence. He says he has no recollection of meeting the businessman and moreover, he's not sure that the very distinctive beard on the video is his beard on the video. Not only does he not seem to be shopping for a plea bargain, he is looking beyond his victory. He calls for prosecuting Sullivan. He added that the International Action Center would circulate a petition in his behalf to prosecute the prosecutors.

As Turner not so subtly puts it, "This country is so immoral, it makes you sick to your stomach."

4 comments:

Larouche is not an economist but a convicted criminal and cult leader who was sent to prison in the 1980s for hijacking over 30 million doloars from people who thought that he was a legitimate person. In this regards, Larouche is more of a Bernie Madoff with his cult's promissory note schemes and credit card fraud. Like Madoff, hardly anyone who lost a total of nearly 34 million dollars in this madmans delusions and fraud will ever see a dime.

Larouche has been a socialist, communist, Christian, left/right winger, pro Russian, anti Russian and anything else you can imagine to sucker people to his delusions.For over 40 years he has been running a cult of endless economic collapse, New Dark Ages and Nuclear war to recruit enough naive colege kids to drop out of school and support him. His cult skips many labor laws as he has them called "volunteers" and has them running like hamsters 18 hours a day, 6 1/2 to 7 days a week with one crisis after another for about 20 to 40 dollars a week.

This cult circus has been going on for over 40 years by Larouche who has to recruit new blood to replace the worn out and broken down cult members who are discarded or those who have figured out how this farce works. Several hundred people have left the cult and in the last dying days of the elderly Larouche, he needs a few naive people to keep him and his wife living that millionaire lifestyle.

You can read about how this charade is run on sites like:

http://laroucheplanet.info/

http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/

http://www.factnet.org/ under discussions where there are over 6K posts from former members about this lunacy.

This is a bum who had the anti semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion placed in his propaganda.

With Turner, the cult does a standard trick of finding someone who is heading downward and use them to make Larouche a Saviour. This has nothing to do with actual cases of corruption, rather, what type of desparate people will take a handout from the cult in exchange for a bit more political life. The cult has done this with convicted political and union officals for decades. What the cult wil do is to create as tory for the subject that the real reason they are indictment or in prison has nothing to do with what they did, but outside forces who all conspired to shut down a leading humanist figure such as Turner or the myriad of others who have beend snared by the cult.

The ultimate prize is to resurrect Larouche into some good publicity and to delude the last gasp of cult members that Larouche too is a political prisoner.Don't look at the long list of victims and money stole, but see what the fantasy that Larouche creates as to why HE is a political prisoner just like Turner. Moon did the same thing after he was convicted of tax fraud like Larouche.

This is all pretty much cult 101.

Larouche and Blacks? Pleeeze.

If you want to see what the real Larouche has to say about Obama, check out what he told his cult privately last year .

http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-obama-menu.htm

" I mean: Obama is a racist. I mean, with an African father--he wasn't much of an African father, but was an African father of Kenya. He was part of a British operation, which took over Kenya, through MI5's operation. But this guy was away from Kenya, and he married a Margaret Mead type, a woman who had a number of successive husbands, like Margaret Mead did. Went out to the poor, brown people, in Asia, and had sex with them! It was called "Coming in Samoa." [groans, laughter] And she wore through a number of successive husbands, and by them, had various children. And therefore, you'll find Obama's ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody's climbing and swinging from the branches there--from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime--which is a branch of British intelligence. "

Thanks for the judgment and details, Lynn. I intentionally avoided delving into LaRouche. This was really about Turner. Between your links and those on the Wikipedia entry, there's lots for folk to evaluate.

Immediately, I find it more worthy of comment that Turner has aligned himself with Ramsey Clark and LaRouche. It may be that he's simply embracing help offered from anywhere. It was odd though that he used some of the same terms as those parties.